Just out of curiosity, is there a way in a nightly release to turn off the "Development version [numbers]" thing in the upper right corner? Really is an immersion killer for me, not to mention interfering with the MFD in the same location.

Only with a hex editor. Load up the executable and search for the string "Development version". You will have two hits and you should concentrate on the second one. In the hex editor, replace the entire version string with spaces (hex 0x20) and you are set.

We deliberately have the version string always enabled on nightlies for easier debug and tracking purposes.

Out of curiosity once again, with these screenshots you have been posting with the new Improved Lighting, Materials, and Shader System are the images still being taken with Reshade in use or has the new stuff gone beyond the need to use Reshade?

Out of curiosity once again, with these screenshots you have been posting with the new Improved Lighting, Materials, and Shader System are the images still being taken with Reshade in use or has the new stuff gone beyond the need to use Reshade?

Ah yes, good question. So, to make this clear, I have not used Reshade since the introduction of the new lighting system in any screenshot and at any time during my testing gameplay sessions. I think I don't really need it anymore.

What I do with those shots is experiment with setting up various materials for core or OXP ships that use the new shader system and grab any result that looks interesting. For example, in the last few gsagostinho's Fer-de-Lance shots, the material used for the ship is set up like this:

stunning screenshots! the alpha tranparency in the rings/visual effects shader is gorgeous, massive well done to everyone involved in the coding and oxp work

i'm not clued up on oolites visual effects system but could this be used to put a semi tranparent polygon in the station docking bay to simulate some sort of energy barrier? if i remember correctly, in the 8bit elites the manual mentions the pattern drawn when docking was to show the 'break pattern' as the ship passes through

Nice! Does this mean that blending is only available for visual effects? And that they are drawn after all of the other, usual, 'solid' entities?

Yes, at the moment blending is deliberately limited to visual effects only. These are drawn during the opaque rendering pass, by momentarily tricking the system and switching blending on for just about the time needed to complete rendering the visual effect mesh and switching it off again to continue with the next object in the opaque pass list.

With a slight modification in the shaders of Norby's telescope, we can achieve something like this: